John C. Dvorak, a PC Mag columnist long seen as a major Microsoft apologist supporter, has become enamored of Ubuntu for himself and his readers, and expresses it in a recent column, Dvorak Likes Linux:

The critical mass has been reached, and it’s time everyone tried Ubuntu.

A strong statement, and a major shift for the irascible writer. He expands it with:

I seriously like the Ubuntu 8.10 implementation and will now install it permanently on my latest machines. It’s a winner…

In many instances the complexity of Linux turns out to be smoothed over by the Ubuntu architecture. It’s so good that I’m a little annoyed with myself for not getting to it sooner.

It’s a pretty amazing change for this IT veteran, made even more so when he caps off the piece with this:

If I had a small or mid-size company, I’d probably use only Linux and open-source software, just to stay out of the way of the software police and their onerous “audits”—another abhorrent situation that, to me, is intolerable.